Preschool children and chimpanzees incur costs to watch punishment of antisocial others

The origins of moral sensitivities: Probing infants' expectations, evaluations, generalization, and enforcement of moral norms

Identifying the origins of moral sensitivities, and their elaboration, within infancy and early childhood is a challenging task, given inherent limitations in infants' behavior. Here, I argue for a multi-pronged, multi-method approach that involves cleaving the moral response at its joints. Specifically, I chart the emergence of infants' moral expectations, evaluations, generalization and enforcement, demonstrating that while many moral sensitivities are present in the second year of life, these sensitivities are closely aligned with, and likely driven by, infants' everyday experience. Moreover, qualitative differences exist between the moral responses that are present in infancy and those of later childhood, particularly in terms of enforcement (i.e., a lack of punishment in infancy). These findings set the stage for addressing outstanding critical questions regarding moral development, that include identifying discrete causal inputs to early moral cognition, identifying whether moral cognition is distinct from social cognition early in life, and explaining gaps that exist between moral cognition and moral behavior in development.

Schadenfreude or empathy? Children's emotional responses to the physical pain and pleasure of prosocial and antisocial others

Adults' emotional reactions to the pain and pleasure of others are influenced by the moral character of those individuals. However, it remains unclear whether children's emotional responses also show such selectivity. To investigate this, we compared 4- to 8-year-old children's emotional responses to the physical pain and pleasure of prosocial versus antisocial puppets. In Study 1, children reported unhappiness after witnessing the pain of the prosocial and antisocial puppets but reported less unhappiness after witnessing the pain of the antisocial puppet. In Study 2, children reported happiness after witnessing the pleasure of both puppets but reported being less happy for the antisocial puppet. These results suggest that children are less likely to empathize with antisocial individuals. Meanwhile, children did not display Schadenfreude (pleasure at others' pain) or Gluckschmerz (displeasure at others' pleasure) toward antisocial individuals in our studies. Moreover, the selectivity of children's emotional responses disappeared after we manipulated the physical competence rather than the moral character of the puppets in Study 3. Our findings help to reveal the moral selectivity of emotional responses to others' pleasure and pain during early childhood.

In search of animal normativity: a framework for studying social norms in non-human animals

Social norms - rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community - are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is little agreement among these researchers about what these psychological prerequisites are. This makes empirical study of animal social norms difficult, since it is not clear what we are looking for and thus what should count as behavioural evidence for the presence (or absence) of social norms in animals. To break this impasse, we offer an approach that moves beyond contested psychological criteria for social norms. This approach is inspired by the animal culture research program, which has made a similar shift away from heavily psychological definitions of 'culture' to become organised around a cluster of more empirically tractable concepts of culture. Here, we propose an analogous set of constructs built around the core notion of a normative regularity, which we define as a socially maintained pattern of behavioural conformity within a community. We suggest methods for studying potential normative regularities in wild and captive primates. We also discuss the broader scientific and philosophical implications of this research program with respect to questions of human uniqueness, animal welfare and conservation.

Human and nonhuman norms: a dimensional framework

Human communities teem with a variety of social norms. In order to change unjust and harmful social norms, it is crucial to identify the psychological processes that give rise to them. Most researchers take it for granted that social norms are uniquely human. By contrast, we approach this matter from a comparative perspective, leveraging recent research on animal social behaviour. While there is currently only suggestive evidence for norms in nonhuman communities, we argue that human social norms are likely produced by a wide range of mechanisms, many of which we share with nonhuman animals. Approaching this variability from a comparative perspective can help norm researchers expand and reframe the range of hypotheses they test when attempting to understand the causes of socially normative behaviours in humans. First, we diagnose some of the theoretical obstacles to developing a comparative science of social norms, and offer a few basic constructs and distinctions to help norm researchers overcome these obstacles. Then we develop a six-dimensional model of the psychological and social factors that contribute to variability in both human and potential nonhuman norms. This article is part of the theme issue 'Social norm change: drivers and consequences'.

Common and distinct equity preferences in children and adults

Fairness plays a crucial role in children's social life and has garnered considerable attention. However, previous research and theories primarily examined the development of children's fairness behaviors in the conflict between self-interest motivation and fairness-complying motivation, neglecting the influence of advantage-seeking motivation. Moreover, despite the well-established role of gain/loss frame in human decision-making, it remains largely unclear whether the framing effect modulates fairness behaviors in children. It was hypothesized that children would exhibit advantage-seeking motivation resulting in more selfish behaviors in the loss context. To examine the hypothesis, we combined an adapted dictator game and computational modeling to investigate various motivations underlying fairness behaviors of children in both loss and gain contexts and to explore the developmental directions by contrasting children and adults. In addition, the current design enabled the dissociation between fairness knowledge and behaviors by asking participants to decide for themselves (the first-party role) or for others (the third-party role). This study recruited a total of 34 children (9-10 years, Mage = 9.82, SDage = 0.38, 16 females) and 31 college students (Mage = 19.81, SDage = 1.40, 17 females). The behavioral results indicated that children behaved more selfishly in first-party and more fairly in third-party than adults, without any significant framing effects. The computational results revealed that both children and adults exhibited aversion to advantageous and disadvantageous inequity in third-party. However, they showed distinct preferences for advantageous inequity in first-party, with advantage-seeking preferences among children and aversion to advantageous inequity among adults. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of children's social preferences and their developmental directions.

Empirical challenges from the comparative and developmental literature to the Shared Intentionality Theory - a review of alternative data on recursive mind reading, prosociality, imitation and cumulative culture

Humans have an irresistible inclination to coordinate actions with others, leading to species-unique forms of cooperation. According to the highly influential Shared Intentionality Theory (SITh), human cooperation is made possible by shared intentionality (SI), typically defined as a suite of socio-cognitive and motivational traits for sharing psychological states with others, thereby enabling individuals to engage in joint action in the mutually aware pursuit of shared goals. SITh theorises that SI evolved as late as 400,000 years ago, when our ancestors (in particular, Homo heidelbergensis) turned to a kind of food procurement that obligatorily required joint coordinated action. SI is, thus, hypothesized to be absent in other extant species, including our closest genetic relatives, the nonhuman great apes ("apes"). According to SITh, ape psychology is exclusively driven by individualistic motivations, as opposed to human psychology which is uniquely driven by altruistic motivations. The evolutionary scenario proposed by SITh builds on a series of findings from socio-cognitive research with apes and human children, and on the assumption that abilities expressed early in human development are human universals, unlikely to have been shaped by socio-cultural influences. Drawing on the primatological and developmental literature, we provide a systematic - albeit selective - review of SITh-inconsistent findings concerning psychological and behavioural traits theorised to be constitutive of SI. The findings we review pertain to all three thematic clusters typically addressed in SITh: (i) recursive mind reading; (ii) prosociality; (iii) imitation and cumulative culture. We conclude that such alternative data undermine two core SITh claims: the late evolutionary emergence of SI and the radical divide between ape and human psychology. We also discuss several conceptual and methodological limitations that currently hamper reliable comparative research on SI, in particular those engendered by Western-centric biases in the social sciences, where an overreliance on Western samples has promoted the formulation of Western-centric conceptualisations, operationalisations and methodologies.

Eye image effect in the context of pedestrian safety: a French questionnaire study

Human behavior is influenced by the presence of others, which scientists also call 'the audience effect'. The use of social control to produce more cooperative behaviors may positively influence road use and safety. This study uses an online questionnaire to test how eyes images affect the behavior of pedestrians when crossing a road. Different eyes images of men, women and a child with different facial expressions -neutral, friendly and angry- were presented to participants who were asked what they would feel by looking at these images before crossing a signalized road. Participants completed a questionnaire of 20 questions about pedestrian behaviors (PBQ). The questionnaire was received by 1,447 French participants, 610 of whom answered the entire questionnaire. Seventy-one percent of participants were women, and the mean age was 35 ± 14 years. Eye images give individuals the feeling they are being observed at 33%, feared at 5% and surprised at 26%, and thus seem to indicate mixed results about avoiding crossing at the red light. The expressions shown in the eyes are also an important factor: feelings of being observed increased by about 10-15% whilst feelings of being scared or inhibited increased by about 5% as the expression changed from neutral to friendly to angry. No link was found between the results of our questionnaire and those of the Pedestrian Behavior Questionnaire (PBQ). This study shows that the use of eye images could reduce illegal crossings by pedestrians, and is thus of key interest as a practical road safety tool. However, the effect is limited and how to increase this nudge effect needs further consideration.

Do Bad People Deserve Empathy? Selective Empathy Based on Targets' Moral Characteristics

The relation between empathy and morality is a widely discussed topic. However, previous discussions mainly focused on whether and how empathy influences moral cognition and moral behaviors, with limited attention to the reverse influence of morality on empathy. This review summarized how morality influences empathy by drawing together a number of hitherto scattered studies illustrating the influence of targets' moral characteristics on empathy. To explain why empathy is morally selective, we discuss its ultimate cause, to increase survival rates, and five proximate causes based on similarity, affective bonds, the appraisal of deservingness, dehumanization, and potential group membership. To explain how empathy becomes morally selective, we consider three different pathways (automatic, regulative, and mixed) based on previous findings. Finally, we discuss future directions, including the reverse influence of selective empathy on moral cognition, the moral selectivity of positive empathy, and the role of selective empathy in selective helping and third-party punishment.

A lineage explanation of human normative guidance: the coadaptive model of instrumental rationality and shared intentionality

This paper aims to contribute to the existing literature on normative cognition by providing a lineage explanation of human social norm psychology. This approach builds upon theories of goal-directed behavioral control in the reinforcement learning and control literature, arguing that this form of control defines an important class of intentional normative mental states that are instrumental in nature. I defend the view that great ape capacities for instrumental reasoning and our capacity (or family of capacities) for shared intentionality coadapted to each other and argue that the evolution of this capacity has allowed the representation of social norms and the emergence of our capacity for normative guidance.

Optimizing the social utility of judicial punishment: An evolutionary biology and neuroscience perspective

Punishment as a response to impairment of individual or group welfare may be found not only among humans but also among a wide range of social animals. In some cases, acts of punishment serve to increase social cooperation among conspecifics. Such phenomena motivate the search for the biological foundations of punishment among humans. Of special interest are cases of pro-social punishment of individuals harming others. Behavioral studies have shown that in economic games people punish exploiters even at a cost to their own welfare. Additionally, neuroimaging studies have reported activity during the planning of such punishment in brain areas involved in the anticipation of reward. Such findings hint that there is an evolutionarily honed basic drive to punish social offenders. I argue that the transfer of punishment authority from the individual to the group requires that social offenders be punished as a public good, even if such punishment is not effective as retribution or deterrent. Furthermore, the social need for punishment of offenders has implications for alternatives to incarceration, publicity of punishment, and judicial structure.

Third-party punishment by preverbal infants

Third-party punishment of antisocial others is unique to humans and seems to be universal across cultures. However, its emergence in ontogeny remains unknown. We developed a participatory cognitive paradigm using gaze-contingency techniques, in which infants can use their gaze to affect agents displayed on a monitor. In this paradigm, fixation on an agent triggers the event of a stone crushing the agent. Throughout five experiments (total N = 120), we show that eight-month-old infants punished antisocial others. Specifically, infants increased their selective looks at the aggressor after watching aggressive interactions. Additionally, three control experiments excluded alternative interpretations of their selective gaze, suggesting that punishment-related decision-making influenced looking behaviour. These findings indicate that a disposition for third-party punishment of antisocial others emerges in early infancy and emphasize the importance of third-party punishment for human cooperation. This behavioural tendency may be a human trait acquired over the course of evolution.

Decision neuroscience and neuroeconomics: Recent progress and ongoing challenges

In the past decade, decision neuroscience and neuroeconomics have developed many new insights in the study of decision making. This review provides an overarching update on how the field has advanced in this time period. Although our initial review a decade ago outlined several theoretical, conceptual, methodological, empirical, and practical challenges, there has only been limited progress in resolving these challenges. We summarize significant trends in decision neuroscience through the lens of the challenges outlined for the field and review examples where the field has had significant, direct, and applicable impacts across economics and psychology. First, we review progress on topics including reward learning, explore-exploit decisions, risk and ambiguity, intertemporal choice, and valuation. Next, we assess the impacts of emotion, social rewards, and social context on decision making. Then, we follow up with how individual differences impact choices and new exciting developments in the prediction and neuroforecasting of future decisions. Finally, we consider how trends in decision-neuroscience research reflect progress toward resolving past challenges, discuss new and exciting applications of recent research, and identify new challenges for the field. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making Psychology > Emotion and Motivation.

On the Working Memory of Humans and Great Apes: Strikingly Similar or Remarkably Different?

In this article we review publications relevant to addressing widely reported claims in both the academic and popular press that chimpanzees working memory (WM) is comparable to, if not exceeding, that of humans. WM is a complex multidimensional construct with strong parallels in humans to prefrontal cortex and cognitive development. These parallels occur in chimpanzees, but to a lesser degree. We review empirical evidence and conclude that the size of WM in chimpanzees is 2 ± 1 versus Miller's famous 7 ± 2 in humans. Comparable differences occur in experiments on chimpanzees relating to strategic and attentional WM subsystems. Regardless of the domain, chimpanzee WM performance is comparable to that of humans around the age of 4 or 5. Next, we review evidence showing parallels among the evolution of WM capacity in hominins ancestral to Homo sapiens, the phylogenetic evolution of hominins leading to Homo sapiens, and evolution in the complexity of stone tool technology over this time period.

I Wanna Draw Like You: Inter- and Intra-Individual Differences in Orang-Utan Drawings

This study analyses 749 drawings by five female Bornean orang-utans (Pongo pygmaeus) at Tama Zoological Park in Japan. We searched for differences between individuals but also tried to identify possible temporal changes among the drawings of one individual, Molly, who drew almost 1300 drawings from 2006 to 2011. An analysis of the drawings was carried out after collecting quantitative and qualitative variables. Our findings reveal evidence of differences in the drawing style of the five individuals as well as creative changes in Molly's drawing style throughout her lifetime. Individuals differed in terms of the colours used, the space they filled, and the shapes (fan patterns, circles, or loops) they drew. Molly drew less and less as she grew older, and we found a significant difference between drawings produced in winter, when orang-utans were kept inside and had less activity, and those produced during other seasons. Our results suggest that the drawing behaviour of these five orang-utans is not random and that differences among individuals might reflect differences of styles, states of mind, and motivation to draw.

Peer victimization and reactive aggression in junior high-school students: A moderated mediation model of retaliatory normative beliefs and self-perspective

Using an experimental design, we examined whether retaliatory normative beliefs mediated the relation between peer victimization and reactive aggression and whether self-perspective moderated the relations among peer victimization, retaliatory normative beliefs, and reactive aggressive behavior in a sample of 381 junior high-school students (165 girls) in Grades 7 and 8. Findings revealed that retaliatory normative beliefs fully mediated the relation between peer victimization and reactive aggression. Moreover, the mediating effect of retaliatory normative beliefs was moderated by self-perspective. Specifically, for the self-distanced group, peer victimization demonstrated a weaker impact on retaliatory normative beliefs than that of the self-immersed group and the control group. These results suggest that adolescents' beliefs about the acceptability of retaliatory aggression (rather than peer victimization) are directly associated with reactive aggression, and that self-distancing may be a protective factor against retaliatory normative beliefs and reactive aggression in provocative situations. The implications and limitations of these findings are discussed.

Toddlers' expectations of third-party punishments and rewards following an act of aggression

Rewarding someone who defends the victim of an unjust aggression and punishing someone who chose not to defend her may be very important acts of reciprocation in social life. This study investigates whether 21-month-olds have some expectations concerning such punishing and rewarding actions. Infants were shown simple puppet shows and were tested using the violation-of-expectation paradigm. In Experiment 1, we found that infants looked longer when they saw a bystander puppet punishing the puppet who defended the victim rather than the puppet who did not defend her. This pattern of looking times was reversed when the punishing action was replaced with a rewarding action (Experiment 2). These findings reveal early-emerging expectations about punitive and reward motivations in third-party contexts, and provide some support for theoretical claims about the hardwiring of the human mind for cooperation and prosociality.

Establishing a Counter-Empathy Processing Model: Evidence from Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Counter-empathy significantly affects people's social lives. Previous evidence indicates that the degree of counter-empathy can be either strong or weak. Strong counter-empathy easily occurs when empathizers are prejudiced against the targets of empathy (e.g., prejudice against outgroup members) and activates brain regions that are opposite to those activated by empathy. Weak counter-empathy may have different neural processing paths from strong one, but its underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. In this work, we used an unfair distribution paradigm, which can reduce participants' prejudice against persons empathized with, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the neural mechanisms underlying counter-empathy. Here, empathy and counter-empathy shared a common neural mechanism, induced by unfair distribution, in the right middle temporal gyrus. Counter-empathy activated distinct brain regions that differed from those of empathic responses in different situations. The functions of these brain regions, which included the middle frontal, middle temporal and left medial superior gyri, were similar and mostly related to emotional regulation and cognitive processing. Here, we propose a process model of counter-empathy, involving two processing paths according to whether or not prejudice exists. This study has theoretical significance and broadens our understanding of the cognitive neural mechanisms underlying empathy and counter-empathy.

Human Cooperation and the Crises of Climate Change, COVID-19, and Misinformation

Contemporary society is facing many social dilemmas-including climate change, COVID-19, and misinformation-characterized by a conflict between short-term self-interest and longer-term collective interest. The climate crisis requires paying costs today to benefit distant others (and oneself) in the future. The COVID-19 crisis requires the less vulnerable to pay costs to benefit the more vulnerable in the face of great uncertainty. The misinformation crisis requires investing effort to assess truth and abstain from spreading attractive falsehoods. Addressing these crises requires an understanding of human cooperation. To that end, we present (a) an overview of mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation, including mechanisms based on similarity and interaction; (b) a discussion of how reputation can incentivize cooperation via conditional cooperation and signaling; and (c) a review of social preferences that undergird the proximate psychology of cooperation, including positive regard for others, parochialism, and egalitarianism. We discuss the three focal crises facing our society through the lens of cooperation, emphasizing how cooperation research can inform our efforts to address them. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 73 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Toddlers' expectations of corporal third-party punishments against the non-defender puppet

Recent research has demonstrated that toddlers expect individuals to approach and reward those who defend a victim from an aggressor rather than those who refuse to do so. This work focused on toddlers' expectations of corporal third-party punishments trought various actions, such as hitting with a stick or repelling someone who refused to defend a social partner following aggression. Using a violation of expectation paradigm (VoE), three experiments were carried out to investigate whether 21-month-olds expect others to apply different kinds of corporal punishments against the non-defender puppet (expected event) rather than the defender puppet (unexpected event), showing a bystander hitting with a stick (Experiment 1) or pushing strongly (Experiment 3) each of the two puppets. In both experiments, toddlers showed to be surprised whent the saw the bystander punish by hitting or pushing the defender puppet rather the non-defender puppet. In a control experiment displaying a non-social condition (Experiment 2), in which the victim puppets were replaced by two inert boxes, toddlers showed no expectation. These results uncovered that toddlers expect others to engage in different corporal punishments toward those who refuse to defend a social partner from an aggressor, by revealing that these expectations are not specific to a single type of punishment. The findings raise questions about the development of corporal third-party punishments, and have implications for the theory on ontogenetic processes underlying sociomoral development.

Toddlers' interventions toward fair and unfair individuals

Cooperative societies rely on reward and punishment for norm enforcement. We examined the developmental origin of these interventions in the context of distributive fairness: past research has shown that infants expect resources to be distributed fairly, prefer to interact with fair distributors, and evaluate others based on their fair and unfair resource allocations. In order to determine whether infants would intervene in third-party resource distributions by use of reward and punishment we developed a novel task. Sixteen-month-old infants were taught that one side of a touch screen produces reward (vocal statements expressing praise; giving a cookie), whereas the other side produces punishment when touched (vocal statements expressing admonishment; taking away a cookie). After watching videos in which one actor distributed resources fairly and another actor distributed resources unfairly, participants' screen touches on the reward and punishment panels while the fair and unfair distributors appeared on screen were recorded. Infants touched the reward side significantly more than the punishment side when presented with the fair distributor but touched the screen sides equally when the unfair distributor was shown. Control experiments revealed no evidence of reward or punishment when infants saw food items they liked and disliked, or individuals uninvolved in the resource distribution events. These results provide the earliest evidence that infants are able to spontaneously intervene in socio-moral situations by rewarding positive actions.

Partner in crime: Beneficial cooperation overcomes children's aversion to antisocial others

Young children display strong aversion toward antisocial individuals, but also feel responsible for joint activities and express a strong sense of group loyalty. This paper aims to understand how beneficial cooperation with an antisocial partner shapes preschoolers' attitudes, preferences, and moral judgments concerning antisocial individuals. We argue that although young children display a strong aversion to antisocial characters, children may overcome this aversion when they stand to personally benefit. In Study 1a (N = 62), beneficial cooperation with an antisocial partner resulted in the children's later preference for the antisocial partner over the neutral partner. Study 1b (N = 91) replicated this effect with discrete measurement of liking (resource distribution) and showed that children rewarded more and punished less the antisocial partner in the beneficial cooperation setting. In Study 2, (N = 58), children's aversion to an antisocial in-group member decreased when the cooperation benefited other in-group members. Finally, in Study 3 (N = 62), when children passively observed the antisocial individual, personal benefits from the antisocial behavior did not change their negative attitude toward the antisocial individual. Overall, beneficial cooperation with the antisocial partner increased the children's liking and preference for the antisocial partner, but did not affect the children's moral judgments. Presented evidence suggests that by the age of 4, children develop a strong obligation to collaborate with partners who help them to acquire resources-even when these partners harm third parties, which children recognize as immoral.

Why do children punish? Fair outcomes matter more than intent in children's second- and third-party punishment

Humans punish fairness violations both as victims and as impartial third parties, which can maintain cooperative behavior. However, it is unknown whether similar motivations underlie punishment of unfairness in these two contexts. Here we approached this question by focusing on how both types of punishment develop in children, asking the question: What motivates young children to punish in response to fairness norm violations? We explored two potential factors: the direct experience of unfair outcomes and a partner's fair versus unfair intentions. The participants, 5- and 7-year-olds, were given the chance to engage in both second- and third-party punishment in response to either intended or unintended fairness norm violations in a single paradigm. In both age-groups, children were more likely to punish when they were directly affected by the allocation (second-party punishment) than when they were an uninvolved third party (third-party punishment). Reliable third-party punishment was shown only in the older age-group. Moreover, children's punishment was driven by outcome rather than intent, with equal rates of punishment when unequal outcomes were either the result of chance or the intentional act of another child. These findings suggest that younger children may be mainly motivated to create equal outcomes between themselves and others, whereas older children are motivated to enforce fairness norms as a general principle.

Old and New Approaches to Animal Cognition: There Is Not "One Cognition"

Using the comparative approach, researchers draw inferences about the evolution of cognition. Psychologists have postulated several hypotheses to explain why certain species are cognitively more flexible than others, and these hypotheses assume that certain cognitive skills are linked together to create a generally "smart" species. However, empirical findings suggest that several animal species are highly specialized, showing exceptional skills in single cognitive domains while performing poorly in others. Although some cognitive skills may indeed overlap, we cannot a priori assume that they do across species. We argue that the term "cognition" has often been used by applying an anthropocentric viewpoint rather than a biocentric one. As a result, researchers tend to overrate cognitive skills that are human-like and assume that certain skills cluster together in other animals as they do in our own species. In this paper, we emphasize that specific physical and social environments create selection pressures that lead to the evolution of certain cognitive adaptations. Skills such as following the pointing gesture, tool-use, perspective-taking, or the ability to cooperate evolve independently from each other as a concrete result of specific selection pressures, and thus have appeared in distantly related species. Thus, there is not "one cognition". Our argument is founded upon traditional Darwinian thinking, which-although always at the forefront of biology-has sometimes been neglected in animal cognition research. In accordance with the biocentric approach, we advocate a broader empirical perspective as we are convinced that to better understand animal minds, comparative researchers should focus much more on questions and experiments that are ecologically valid. We should investigate nonhuman cognition for its own sake, not only in comparison to the human model.

The emerging neuroscience of social punishment: Meta-analytic evidence

Social punishment (SOP)-third-party punishment (TPP) and second-party punishment (SPP)-sanctions norm-deviant behavior. The hierarchical punishment model (HPM) posits that TPP is an extension of SPP and both recruit common processes engaging large-scale domain-general brain networks. Here, we provided meta-analytic evidence to the HPM by combining the activation likelihood estimation approach with connectivity analyses and hierarchical clustering analyses. Although both forms of SOP engaged the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and bilateral anterior insula (AI), a functional differentiation also emerged with TPP preferentially engaging social cognitive regions (temporoparietal junction) and SPP affective regions (AI). Further, although both TPP and SPP recruit domain-general networks (salience, default-mode, and central-executive networks), some specificity in network organization was observed. By revealing differences and commonalities of the neural networks consistently activated by different types of SOP, our findings contribute to a better understanding of the neuropsychological mechanisms of social punishment behavior--one of the most peculiar human behaviors.

He had it Comin': ERPs Reveal a Facilitation for the Processing of Misfortunes to Antisocial Characters

Human sociality and prosociality rely on social and moral feelings of empathy, compassion, envy, schadenfreude, as well as on the preference for prosocial over antisocial others. We examined the neural underpinnings of the processing of lexical input designed to tap into these type of social feelings. Brainwave responses from 20 participants were measured as they read sentences comprising a randomly delivered ending outcome (fortunate or unfortunate) to social agents previously profiled as prosocial or antisocial individuals. Fortunate outcomes delivered to prosocial and antisocial agents aimed to tap into empathy and envy/annoying feelings, respectively, whereas unfortunate ones into compassion for prosocial agents and schadenfreude for antisocial ones. ERP modulations in early attention-capture (100-200 ms), semantic fit (400 ms), and late reanalysis processes (600 ms) were analyzed. According to the functional interpretation of each of these event-related electrophysiological effects, we conclude that: 1) a higher capture of attention is initially obtained in response to any type of outcome delivered to a prosocial versus an antisocial agent (frontal P2); 2) a facilitated semantic processing occurs for unfortunate outcomes delivered to antisocial agents (N400); and 3) regardless of the protagonist's social profile, an increased later reevaluation for overall unfortunate versus fortunate outcomes takes place (Late Positive Potential). Thus, neural online measures capture a stepwise unfolding impact of social factors during language comprehension, which include a facilitated processing of misfortunes when they happen to occur to antisocial peers (i.e., schadenfreude).

Human children but not chimpanzees make irrational decisions driven by social comparison

Human evolutionary success is often argued to be rooted in specialized social skills and motivations that result in more prosocial, rational and cooperative decisions. One manifestation of human ultra-sociality is the tendency to engage in social comparison. While social comparison studies typically focus on cooperative behaviour and emphasize concern for fairness and equality, here we investigate the competitive dimension of social comparison: a preference for getting more than others, expressed in a willingness to maximize relative payoff at the cost of absolute payoff. Chimpanzees and human children (5-6- and 9-10-year-olds) could decide between an option that maximized their absolute payoff (but put their partner at an advantage) and an option that maximized their relative payoff (but decreased their own and their partner's payoff). Results show that, in contrast to chimpanzees and young children, who consistently selected the rational and payoff-maximizing option, older children paid a cost to reduce their partner's payoff to a level below their own. This finding demonstrates that uniquely human social skills and motivations do not necessarily lead to more prosocial, rational and cooperative decision-making.

Revenge: A Multilevel Review and Synthesis

Why do people take revenge? This question can be difficult to answer. Vengeance seems interpersonally destructive and antithetical to many of the most basic human instincts. However, an emerging body of social scientific research has begun to illustrate a logic to revenge, demonstrating why revenge evolved in humans and when and how people take revenge. We review this evidence and suggest that future studies on revenge would benefit from a multilevel perspective in which individual acts of revenge exist within higher-level cultural systems, with the potential to instigate change in these systems over time. With this framework, we can better understand the interplay between revenge's psychological properties and its role in cultural evolution.